The two-volume Oxford Companion to American Politics is the first reference work to provide detailed, in-depth coverage of all aspects of American Politics. Top scholars of American Politics have written entries that surpass all previous reference material on the subject and provide scholars and students with ready access to sophisticated, comprehensive material. Long entries form the core of the book, covering such topics as climate change, terrorism, welfare policies, nuclear proliferation, voting behavior, and think tanks. Each of these entries include high-level scrutiny of the literature, history and future of the topic. The Companion also includes a number of entries from the 2001 Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, revised as necessary to bring coverage of such topics as foreign aid, and nuclear weapons up to date. In the current context of political gridlock, international tension, economic underperformance and social division, students of American politics need to focus on more than the inner workings of their own political institutions, important as that focus is. They also need to approach their work with as wide an understanding of our contemporary international and domestic economic, social and cultural conditions as it is possible for them quickly and easily to acquire. The Oxford Companion to American Politics has been designed precisely to meet the full range of those needs.

The relevance of lawyers and jurists in the process of state-building in nineteenth-century Latin America has been widely acknowledged. This collection of essays assembles a series of studies dealing with the interaction between the legal world and the wider political, economic, social and cultural processes in which the transition from colonial status to independent nationhood took place. Rather than viewing this transition as a radical transformation of judicial institutions and practices, emphasis has been put upon the continuities between those two phases. The chapters range from general overviews of both colonial and republican Spanish America to more detailed case studies of Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. contributors include: Linda Arnold, Virginia Tech; Osvaldo Barreneche, Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina; Charles R. Cutter, Purdue University; Thomas H. Holloway, Cornell University; Victor M. Uribe, Florida International University.

Holy War in Judaism is the first book to consider how the concept of ''holy war'' disappeared from Jewish thought for almost 2000 years, only to reemerge with renewed vigor in modern times. Holy war, sanctioned or even commanded by God, is a common and recurring theme in the Hebrew Bible, but Rabbinic Judaism largely avoided discussion of holy war in the Talmud and related literatures for the simple reason that it became extremely dangerous and self-destructive. The revival of the holy war idea occurred with the rise of Zionism, and as the need for organized Jewish engagement in military actions developed, Orthodox Jews faced a dilemma. There was great need for all to engage in combat for the survival of the infant state of Israel, but the Talmudic rabbis had virtually eliminated divine authorization for Jews to fight in Jewish armies. The first stage of the revival was sanction for Jews to fight in defense. The next stage emerged with the establishment of the state and allowed Orthodox Jews to enlist even when the community was not engaged in a war of survival. Once the notion of divinely sanctioned warring was revived, it became available to Jews who considered that the historical context justified more aggressive forms of warring. Among some Jews, divinely authorized war became associated not only with defense but also with a renewed kibbush or conquest, a term that became central to the discourse regarding war and peace and the lands conquered by the state of Israel in 1967. By the early 1980's, the rhetoric of holy war had entered the general political discourse of modern Israel. In this book Reuven Firestone identifies, analyzes, and explains the historical, conceptual, and intellectual processes that revived holy war ideas in modern Judaism. The book serves as a case study of the way in which one ancient religious concept, once deemed irrelevant or even dangerous, was successfully revived in order to fill a pressing contemporary need. It also helps to clarify the current political and religious situation in relation to war and peace in Israel and the Middle East.

Between 1920 and 1994, the Catholic Church was Rwanda's most dominant social and religious institution. In recent years, the church has been critiqued for its perceived complicity in the ethnic discourse and political corruption that culminated with the 1994 genocide. In analyzing the contested legacy of Catholicism in Rwanda, Rwanda Before the Genocide focuses on a critical decade, from 1952 to 1962, when Hutu and Tutsi identities became politicized, essentialized, and associated with political violence. This study-the first English-language church history on Rwanda in over 30 years-examines the reactions of Catholic leaders such as the Swiss White Father Andre Perraudin and Aloys Bigirumwami, Rwanda's first indigenous bishop. It evaluates Catholic leaders' controversial responses to ethnic violence during the revolutionary changes of 1959-62 and after Rwanda's ethnic massacres in 1963-64, 1973, and the early 1990s. In seeking to provide deeper insight into the many-threaded roots of the Rwandan genocide, Rwanda Before the Genocide offers constructive lessons for Christian ecclesiology and social ethics in Africa and beyond.

Two-time Pulitzer prize winner Bob Woodward tells the revelatory, behind-the-scenes story of three wars – Ukraine, the Middle East and the struggle for the American presidency.

War is an intimate and sweeping account of one of the most tumultuous periods in presidential politics and American history.

We see President Joe Biden and his top advisers in tense conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. We also see Donald Trump, conducting a shadow presidency and seeking to regain political power.

With unrivalled, inside-the-room reporting, Woodward shows President Biden’s approach to managing the war in Ukraine, the most significant land war in Europe since World War II, and his tortured path to contain the bloody Middle East conflict between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.

Woodward reveals the extraordinary complexity and consequence of wartime back-channel diplomacy and decision-making to deter the use of nuclear weapons and a rapid slide into World War III.

The raw cage-fight of politics accelerates as Americans prepare to vote in 2024, starting between President Biden and Trump, and ending with the unexpected elevation of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president.

War provides an unvarnished examination of the vice president as she tries to embrace the Biden legacy and policies while beginning to chart a path of her own as a presidential candidate.

Woodward’s reporting once again sets the standard for journalism at its most authoritative and illuminating.

Business is one of the major power centres in modern society. The state seeks to check and channel that power so as to serve broader public policy objectives. However, if the way in which business is governed is ineffective or over burdensome, it may become more difficult to achieve desired goals such as economic growth or higher levels of employment. In a period of international economic crisis, the study of how business and government relate to each other in different countries is of more central importance than ever.
These relationships have been studied from a number of different disciplinary perspectives--business studies, economics, economic history, law, and political science-- and all of these are represented in this handbook. The first part of the book provides an introduction to the ways in which five different disciplines have approached the study of business and government. The second section, on the firm and the state, looks at how these entities interact in different settings, emphasising such phenomena as the global firm and varieties of capitalism. The third section examines how business interacts with government in different parts of the world, including the United States, the EU, China, Japan and South America. The fourth section reviews changing patterns of market governance through a unifying theme of the role of regulation. Business-government relations can play out in divergent ways in different policy and the fifth section examines the contrasts between different key arenas such as competition policy, trade policy, training policy and environmental policy.
The volume provides an authoritative overview with chapters by leading authorities on the current state of knowledge of business-government relations, but also points to ways in which this work might be developed in the future, e.g., through a political theory of the firm.
About the Series
Oxford Handbooks in Business & Management bring together the world's leading scholars on the subject to discuss current research and the latest thinking in a range of interrelated topics including Strategy, Organizational Behavior, Public Management, International Business, and many others. Containing completely new essays with extensive referencing to further reading and key ideas, the volumes, in hardback or paperback, serve as both a thorough introduction to a topic and a useful desk reference for scholars and advanced students alike.

"Original and wide-ranging, Murphy's discerning and important study is another reminder that America is 'the nation with the soul of a church.'"
-Journal of American History
"A wide-ranging and thoughtful meditation on how the theo-political stories we Americans tell ourselves resonate with and sometimes even create the communities we inhabit. This book deserves an honored place among the oeuvre of work by political scientists and historians on the jeremiad."
-- Politics and Religion
"A significant contribution to the historical account of the role of religion in American politics."
--Perspectives on Politics
"Prodigal Nation is a careful account of how theologies function politically and deserves attention from political scientists, political theologians, American historians, and others interested in the interface of religion and culture."
--Religious Studies Review
"This highly original and wonderfully written analysis will be invaluable to anyone interested in the meaning of America." --Harry S. Stout, author of The New England Soul and Upon the Altar of the Nation
"A brilliant analysis of the American jeremiad. Elegant, powerful, hopeful, and wise - Prodigal Nation is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the fitful history of the American spirit." --James A. Morone, author of Hellfire Nation and The Democratic Wish

The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs is a passionate yet analytical critique of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptural fundamentalists. Schimmel examines the ways in which otherwise intelligent and bright Jews, Christians, and Muslims defend their belief in the divine authorship of the Bible or of the Koran, and other religious beliefs derived from those claims, against overwhelming evidence and argument to the contrary from science, scholarship, common sense, and rational analysis. He also examines the motives, fears, and anxieties of scriptural fundamentalists that induce them to cling so tenaciously to their unreasonable beliefs.
Schimmel begins with reflections on his own journey from commitment to Orthodox Judaism, through doubts about its theological dogmas and doctrines, to eventual denial of their truth. He follows this with an examination of theological and philosophical debates about the proper relationships between faith, reason, and revelation. Schimmel then devotes separate chapters to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptural fundamentalism, noting their similarities and differences. He analyzes in depth the psychological and social reasons why people acquire, maintain, and protect unreasonable religious beliefs, and how they do so. Schimmel also discusses unethical and immoral consequences of scriptural fundamentalism, such as gender inequality, homophobia, lack of intellectual honesty, self-righteousness, intolerance, propagation of falsehood, and in some instances, the advocacy of violence and terrorism. He concludes with a discussion of why, when, and where it is appropriate to critique, challenge, and combat scriptural fundamentalists. The Tenacity ofUnreasonable Beliefs is thoughtful and provocative, written to encourage self-reflection and self-criticism, and to stimulate and to enlighten all who are interested in the psychology of religion and in religious fundamentalism.

Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long been instrumental in establishing, maintaining, and challenging political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature of religious practice. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here, an interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each chapter, built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict, is multi-authored. The book's central question is: "When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?"

Cognisant of the globalising context in which we find ourselves, as intellectuals we ought to ensure relevance in what we teach. This orientation, that prizes pedagogic relevance, has been raised as an objection to the decolonial call, being – at times – used to resist democratic change in the South African University. The contributions in this volume highlight the implications of the global relevance discourse through revealing the impact of decontextualised curricula.

Similarly, institutional democratisation and decolonisation ought not to be a turn to fundamentalist positions that recreate the essentialisms resisted through calls for decolonisation. As a critical response to such resistance to democratisation, this book showcases how decolonisation protects the constitutionally enshrined ideal of academic freedom and the freedom of scientific research. We argue that this framing of decoloniality should not be used to protect interests that seek to undermine the transformation of higher education. Concurrently, however, it is critical of decolonial positions that are essentialist and narrow in their manifestation and articulation.

Decolonisation as Democratisation suggests what is intended by a curriculum revisionist agenda that prizes decolonisation through bringing together academics working in South Africa and the global academy. This collaborative approach aims to facilitate critical reflexivity in our curriculum reform strategies while developing pragmatic solutions to current calls for decolonisation.

In the 1970s, South Africa’s wine industry was a closed shop – dominated by monopolies, Afrikaner nationalism and Apartheid-era control. Red Tape tells the remarkable story of Tim Hamilton Russell, a maverick entrepreneur and founder of Hamilton Russell Vineyards, who was determined to challenge this status quo. Defying restrictive laws, industry boycotts, and scepticism from the establishment, Tim pursued his vision to plant noble grape varietals in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley – a region few believed in – proving the country could produce world-class table wines.

This richly detailed account, written by his daughter Bridgid Hamilton-Russell, uncovers the political obstacles he faced, the court battles he waged, and the legacy he built in establishing a wine region now recognised worldwide. Blending biography, social history, and an insider’s view of a transformative era, Red Tape reveals how courage and vision can reshape an industry.

Black Natural Law offers a new way of understanding the African American political tradition. Iconoclastically attacking left (including James Baldwin and Audre Lorde), right (including Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson), and center (Barack Obama), Vincent William Lloyd charges that many Black leaders today embrace secular, white modes of political engagement, abandoning the deep connections between religious, philosophical, and political ideas that once animated Black politics. By telling the stories of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lloyd shows how appeals to a higher law, or God's law, have long fueled Black political engagement. Such appeals do not seek to implement divine directives on earth; rather, they pose a challenge to the wisdom of the world, and they mobilize communities for collective action. Black natural law is deeply democratic: while charismatic leaders may provide the occasion for reflection and mobilization, all are capable of discerning the higher law using our human capacities for reason and emotion. At a time when continuing racial injustice poses a deep moral challenge, the most powerful intellectual resources in the struggle for justice have been abandoned. Black Natural Law recovers a rich tradition, and it examines just how this tradition was forgotten. A Black intellectual class emerged that was disconnected from social movement organizing and beholden to white interests. Appeals to higher law became politically impotent: overly rational or overly sentimental. Recovering the Black natural law tradition provides a powerful resource for confronting police violence, mass incarceration, and today's gross racial inequities. Black Natural Law will change the way we understand natural law, a topic central to the Western ethical and political tradition. While drawing particularly on African American resources, Black Natural Law speaks to all who seek politics animated by justice.

This is one of four projected volumes to emerge from a massive, Pew-funded study that sought to answer the question: What happens when a revivalist religion based on scriptural orthodoxy participates in the volatile politics of the Third World? Is the result a democratic politics of the ballot box, or is it more like an authoritarian politics of command from on high? Does the evangelical faith of the Bible hinder or promote a politics of the ballot box? At a time when the global-political impact of another revivalist and scriptural religion - Islam - fuels vexed debate among analysts the world over, these volumes offer an unusual comparative perspective on a critical issue: The often combustible interaction of resurgent religion and the developing world's unstable politics. Three of the volumes focus on particular regions (Africa, Latin America and Asia). The fourth will address the broader question of evangelical Christianity and democracy in the global setting. The present volume considers the case of Asia. In his introduction, editor David Lumsdaine offers a historical overview of evangelicalism in the region, provides a theoretical framework for understanding evangelical impact on the global south, and summarizes the findings presented in the remainder of the book. Six individual case studies follow, focusing respectively on the situation in China, Western India, Northeast India, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines. The contributors, mainly younger scholars based in Asia, bring first hand-knowledge to their chapters and employ both field and archival research to develop their data and analyses. The result is a groundbreaking work that will be indispensable to everyoneconcerned with the future of the region.

What is wrong with the news? To answer this dismaying question, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex S. Jones has written Losing the News, a probing look at the epochal changes sweeping the media which are eroding the core news that has been the essential food supply of our democracy. At a time of dazzling technological innovation, Jones says that what stands to be lost is the fact-based reporting that serves as a watchdog over government, holds the powerful accountable, and gives citizens what they need. In a tumultuous new media era, with cutthroat competition and panic over profits, the commitment of the traditional news media to serious news is fading. Should we lose a critical mass of this news, our democracy will weaken or even fail. As the old economic model for news is being shattered by digital technology, the news media are making a painful passage that is taking a toll on journalistic values and standards. Journalistic objectivity and ethics are under assault, as is the bastion of the First Amendment. Jones characterizes himself not as a pessimist about news, but a realist. The breathtaking possibilities that the web offers are undeniable, but at what cost? Pundits and talk show hosts have persuaded Americans that the crisis in news is bias and partisanship. Not so, says Jones. The real crisis is the erosion of the iron core of news, something that hurts Republicans and Democrats alike. In its concluding chapters, Losing the News looks over the horizon, exploring ways the core can be preserved. Losing the News, the penultimate title in Oxford's highly successful Annenberg Institutions of Democracy series, depicts an unsettling situation in which theAmerican birthright of fact-based, reported news is in danger. But it is also a call to arms to fight to keep the core of news intact.

The leading Harvard professor shows how we can all become better at conversation – and why this will help us all thrive

Conversation is at the heart of our relationships and our decision-making. From meeting a colleague to saying goodnight to our loved ones, our days are filled with verbal communication -- but the science of everyday conversation is little known. We may spend time thinking about difficult exchanges, but research shows that there’s room to improve seemingly easy interactions too.

In Talk, Harvard professor Alison Wood Brooks shows how simple changes in how we communicate can enhance our relationships, our performance at work and our lives; who we talk to affects our happiness; and how to talk across differences. Her original research, based on thousands of conversations from sales calls to speed dating, provides fascinating insights - for instance, the way that certain questions affect dating success, and the role of jokes in reaching leadership positions.

Learning to converse even a little more effectively can make a big difference. Through her original TALK framework – Topics, Asking, Levity and Kindness – Wood Brooks will give you the tools that her MBA students say transforms their lives. Bringing together psychology, linguistics, sociology and neuroscience, Talk will show how we can use science to help us enrich our lives, one conversation at a time.

The "Encyclopedia" is the only resource available that focuses exclusively on the expanding role of minorities in U.S. politics. Containing more than 2,000 entries, this two-volume set is divided into four distinct sections covering African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. It makes a broad range of information readily accessible, including historical and contemporary biographies, descriptions of major events, and coverage of important legal decisions and organizations.

‘An unsanitised reflection on the deep intersecting crisis that humanity finds itself in at a time of global pessimism and despair. Yet, the inspirational case studies and the lessons they offer guide us to a transformative path towards sanity, justice and sustainability. A timely contribution in this moment of deep searching for systemic solutions’ — Kumi Naidoo, President, Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative and Global ambassador, Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity
‘In a world spiraling through climate breakdown and extreme inequality, this book reveals how communities are already building real alternatives from below. From Kerala to Mondragón, these stories of solidarity, commons, and planetary care show that another post-capitalist future is not just possible, it’s happening’
— Kohei Saito, author of Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth
Communism
‘For anyone wanting to find out what worker cooperatives and the solidarity-economy based cooperative systems are, this book is an important source of knowledge and insights. It is also a great source of inspiration about the positive difference that the cooperative system can, and does, make to individuals, communities, societies, and to nature’ — Adotey Bing-Pappoe, Co-Chair of Cooperation Africa
Capitalism’s crisis is planetary. It is a system upending nature and society, causing many to live and work in despair. So far, the left has been incapable of inspiring a practical challenge to it. In Worker Cooperatives and Deep Democracy, Vishwas Satgar and Michelle Williams map a new transformative politics arising from inspiring worker cooperative systems that advance planetary care from below and that have the potential to undermine the capitalist status quo.
Based on over a decade of research across 15 countries, the authors examine case studies that explore transformative approaches to social reproduction, public power, nature, and territorial expansion in opposition to global hegemonic power. They also uncover the power of solidarities engendering emancipatory, utopian imaginaries in the global north and south.
They show how, against all the odds, people are experimenting with deep democracy and building systems of care to live diff erently and exit the planetary crisis

The United States has never had an officially established church. Since the time of the first British colonists, it has instead developed a strong civil religion that melds national symbols to symbols of God. In a deft exploration of American civil religious symbols ranging from the Liberty Bell and Vietnam Memorial to Mount Rushmore and Disney World, Peter Gardella explains how the places, objects, and symbols that Americans hold sacred came into being and how they have changed over time. In addition to examining revered historical sites and structures, he analyzes such sacred texts as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Kennedy Inaugural, and the speeches of Martin Luther King, and shows how five patriotic songs-''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic'' ''America the Beautiful,'' ''God Bless America,'' and ''This Land Is Your Land''-have been elevated into hymns. Arguing that certain values-personal freedom, political democracy, world peace, and cultural tolerance-have held American civil religion together, this book chronicles the numerous forms those values have taken, from Jamestown and Plymouth to the September 11, 2001, Memorial in New York.

On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens.

A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British television history, in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS – hitherto an organisation shrouded in secrecy – laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod.

Drawing on unpublished source material, exclusive interviews with the SAS, and testimony from witnesses including hostages, negotiators, intelligence officers and the on-site psychiatrist, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes readers on a gripping journey from the years and weeks of build-up on both sides, to the minute-by-minute account of the siege and rescue.

Recreating the dramatic conversations between negotiators and hostages, the cutting-edge intelligence work happening behind-the-scenes, and the media frenzy around this moment of international significance, The Siege is the remarkable story of what really happened on those fateful six days, and the first full account of a moment that forever changed the way the nation thought about the SAS – and itself.

An explosive account of one of the most hubristic mistakes in American political history: Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection despite mounting evidence of his decline, and his team's increasingly desperate efforts to hide it.

In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy.

Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump term. He, his family and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again that they lied to themselves, allies and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on 28 June 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed – all but dooming the Democrats to defeat later that year.

Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Here, two of America’s best-respected political journalists take us behind closed doors to reveal the extent of Biden’s decline and who knew about it, from White House staffers to senators to Hollywood celebrities. They paint President Biden’s decision to run for re-election as shockingly narcissistic, delusional and reckless – and the wider cover-up as an act of unprecedented public deception. Rarely has hubris met nemesis so explosively.

The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will endure for decades. In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, marking the beginning of a remarkable campaign of denial and gaslighting against the American public. His decision to run again was the original sin of his presidency – the moment that led directly to Donald Trump’s return to power and all that has come since.